Life
Born in 1694, Augustine was only four years old when his father died. He inherited about 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) on Bridges Creek in Westmoreland County; his sister Mildred inherited what was called the Little Hunting Creek property; they both inherited slaves.
When Washington came of age (and into his inheritance) in 1715, he married Jane Butler, an orphan, who had inherited about 640 acres (2.6 km2) from her father. The young couple settled on the Bridges Creek property. In 1718, Washington purchased land on Popes Creek, abridging his property on Bridges Creek. About 1726, he had a new house built there (later called Wakefield) with the help of slave labor and fine craftsmen. In the same year, he purchased the Little Hunting Creek property from his sister Mildred.
In addition to his work supervising overseers and slave labor as a tobacco planter, Washington was active in the Anglican Church and in local politics. He took the oath as justice of the peace for the county court in July 1716, and served as county sheriff.
Washington and his first wife Jane Butler had four children, only two of whom (Lawrence and Augustine, Jr.) lived to adulthood.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most of all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)